Today, faced with an increasingly mobile population, global accessibility to healthcare information is becoming increasingly essential. Unfortunately, early electronic approaches to automated medical record systems tended to apply industrial engineering concepts to understanding and automating the flow of healthcare data, with the expectant failures.
It has been envisioned that the future patient record will be that of a multimedia record capable of including text, high-resolution images, sound, and full-motion video. These systems, which have come to be known as Computer-Based Patient Record (CPR) systems, will ultimately be expected to offer improved access, quality, security, flexibility, connectivity, and efficiency.
CPR systems are used to maintain patient records such as histories, reports, charts, and images in digitized form within the networked system of one or more health care institutions. This enables authorized users to access patient records remotely employing client devices such as desktop computers, laptops, personal digital assistants (PDA's) and the like, coupled to a networked system via wired and/or wireless network paths.
Today, knowledge bases provide machine-readable resources for the dissemination of information, generally online or with the capacity to be put online. An integral component of knowledge management systems, a knowledge base is used to optimize information collection, organization, and retrieval for an organization, or for the public at large. A well-organized knowledge base can save an enterprise a considerable amount of money by decreasing the amount of employee time spent trying to find information about such topics as tax laws, or company policies and procedures. A knowledge base can give users easy access to information that would otherwise require laborious contact with many people.
In general, a knowledge base is not a static collection of information, but a dynamic resource that can itself have the capacity to “learn”, as part of an artificial intelligence (AI) expert system for example. An expert system is a computer application that performs a task that would otherwise be performed by a human expert. For example, there are expert systems that can make financial forecasts or schedule routes for delivery vehicles. Some expert systems are designed to take the place of human experts, while others are designed to aid them. To design an expert system, a knowledge engineer studies how human experts in a particular field make decisions. They then create rules that are subsequently translated into terms a computer can understand.
However, existing knowledge bases are so inherently tied to their inference engines that they lack flexibility. Typically, within a knowledge base, the tool of choice has been the “IF_THEN” conditional statement. A basic IF-THEN statement is used when the choice is whether to take an action or not; there is no alternative action. The condition in an IF-THEN statement is considered true if its value is non-zero, and false if its value is zero. The IF-THEN statement provides direction only when a parameter is found to be true. The problem is that IF-THEN statements are too rigid. What is needed is a data management system that can better emulate the superior reasoning processes of a human to facilitate diagnosis and treatment in an efficient and effective manner.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for an improved system and method for the management of medical and other records.